On Thursday 24 July 2014 02:45:51 Steve Blackmore did opine And Gene did reply: > On Thu, 24 Jul 2014 01:29:45 -0400, you wrote: > >Steve, you've helped me on occasion, so I am somewhat puzzled at the > >negativity of your recent posts. Is there a reason for that? > > Hi Gene - frustration at the current lack of usable cnc controller > software. > > Steve Blackmore
Well, I wouldn't call it unusable even for a lathe, I can run the G76 thread cutting code just fine, and I can even do the G33.1 rigid tapping thing, on a 7x12 that I have made a spindle encoder for, removing the change gears as LCNC does all that, and retrofitted it with ball screws and a 1 horsepower motor, designing and building everything that entails. Not too well, I am going to have to redo it for much increased rigidity in the jackshaft mounting as I under-estimated the raw torque a 1hp universal motor can put out when its driven by a driver than can make 25 amps surge, 10+ steady. A silk purse it isn't, but you would have a hard time looking at its output and calling it the sows ear it was 14 years ago when I bought it from a traveling tool sale truck, incomplete, for a $350 check. I just got thru putting ball screws in for XY on an HF Micromill with the L.M.S. big tables kit and that was then used to carve an even more accurate encoder disk for the lathe. To say it is not usable, is far more that you think it ought to be plug & play than any fault in the software. In fact every machine is going to need configured correctly, and thats going to mean you get your hands dirty running gedit or vim, even emacs (whatever your fav editor is) as no two consecutive serial numbers will be close enough to use an identical configuration. Any CNC program is going to have to be configured to compensate for the machines shortcomings, such as screw backlash etc. In the case of the lathe, with its one quadrant driver, making it go a G33.1 involves around 150 lines of the hal file I carved up to run it, about 300 total LOC in fact. I had to detect the spindle dir signal changing state, and synthesize a stop using dynamic braking, then bring it back up to speed from zero in reverse. Repeat for the rev to fwd switch. More code. So thats partially the extra 150 LOC, but a good sized box with 5 DPDT relays, a power supply for them, and the braking resistors in it in addition to the motor driver and a Mesa SpinX1 to control the driver itself. Exactly none of that is a standard "plug and go" install. I never expected it to be. Truly plug & go is never going to happen and it makes no difference what the name on the install disk says as long as it meets the LCNC latency requirements. That in itself disqualifies windoze because there is nothing "realtime" about windoze, any version. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
